‘Because I am a Girl’: Identity and Positioning in Afghani Women Narratives

Document Type : Original Article

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Department of English, Faculty of Al-Alsun, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt.

Abstract

This study investigates how Afghani women position themselves and others in gender-based violence (GBV) narratives. It examines how they simultaneously construct their identities. The data belong to the Afghani Women Writing Project (AWWP), a website launched in 2009, as an attempt to give voice to silenced Afghani women before, during and after Taliban regime. The study adopts a qualitative methodology of analysing a select number of narratives using Bucholtz and Hall (2005) Identity Framework, with special focus on the indexicality principle, which informs how identity is linguistically encoded via the different lexical, structural and pragmatic resources in the narrative. The results of the micro-linguistic analysis are further analysed in the light of Bamberg’s (1997, 2004) model of positioning, which examines how narrators position themselves vis-à-vis the other participants in the narrative, the outer environment, and most importantly, themselves. Findings show two opposing identity positions. First, the narrators are positioned as agents, in control of events and has the ability to change. Second, the story characters within the narratives are positioned as victims of different forms of GBV, totally submissive to different forms of oppression. These findings scaffold the growing assumption that narratives are identity-construction tools in discursive interaction.

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